CA Agile Central vs GitLab

GitLab compared to other DevOps tools

CA Agile Central is an agile project planning and management tool designed to help enterprise teams adopt and implement agile methodologies. Based on the acquisition of Rally Software, Agile Central enables teams to manage their backlog of user stories, estimate and plan the work to deliver the user stories and then manage the actual delivery. Rally supports multiple agile methodologies from sprints, where the delivery work is timeboxed to kanban, where the focus is on flow.

FEATURES

Issues

Quickly set the status, assignee or milestone for multiple issues at the same time or easily filter them on any properties. See milestones and issues across projects.

You can move issues between projects in GitLab. All links, history and comments will be copied and the original issue will reference the newly moved issue. This makes working with multiple issue trackers much easier.

Tracking, managing and reporting on the budget and actual costs of the project. Able to allocate costs to OPex or CAPex depending on specific organization reporting rules. Time tracking information used to determine labor cost allocations. Specific features would include: budget, spend, time tracking, resource cost, Capex/Opex.

Hill Chart Status reporting

Hill charts make it simple to report the general status of a work item, issue, or project. Where before the top of the hill, the item is full of uncertaintly and unknowns, and after the crest of the hill, execution is clear sailing with fewer risks and unknowns.

Project Issue Board

GitLab has Issue Boards, each list of an Issue Board is based on a label that exists in your issue tracker. The Issue Board will therefore match the state of your issue tracker in a user-friendly way.

Large companies often have hundreds of different projects, all with different moving parts at the same time. GitLab Enterprise Edition allows for multiple Issue Boards for a single project so you can to plan, organize, and visualize a workflow for a feature or product release. Multiple Issue Boards are particularly useful for large projects with more than one team or in situations where a repository is used to host the code of multiple products.

An Issue Board is based on its project's label structure, therefore, it applies the same descriptive labels to indicate placement on the board. GitLab issues can appear on multiple issues and they still have meaning without the context of a particular board.

Issue boards/dashboards reflect an organizations flow for processing work items. These boards can reflect individualized workflow or follow established patterns. Issue board types with established patterns (such as Scrum and Kanban) can make setup of new boards easier.

Able to capture and track future features, capabilities, and work in a consolodated and organized list which enables the team to organize, prioritize, accept, plan and start work on relevant items. The backlog is where future work is captured, defined, evaluated, and planned. Specific features would include: Backlog, user stories, issues, effort estimate, priority, backlog board.

Risk/Issue Management

Able to define and manage project RISK and ISSUE status and workflow to identify, track, mitigate and resolve potential risks and active issues facing the project. Risk/Issue status and resolution managed through online workfow that tracks assignment and actions to address the specific item. Specific features would include: workflow, risk severity, risk priority, Assigning Risk/Issue for action, Risk/Issue status.

DevOps Pipeline

Able to establish visibility into the end to end DevOps pipeline so the entire team is aware of pipeline status and can contribute to overall success. Specific features would include: visibility into status of pipeline

Portfolio Planning

Establishing strategic priorities and direction in order to govern the allocation of corporate resources to support specific business/IT initiatives. Strategic planning evaluates in-flight projects and proposed future initiatives to shape and govern the ongoing investment in projects and discretionary work. Able to model and optimize different portfolio investment scenarios to determine the ideal funding combinations to meet strategic priorities. Specific features would include: Proposals, epics, backlog, strategic alignment, estimation, prioritization, what-if, monte-carlo simulation, optimization.

Portfolio Status Management

Tracks and reports on the overall status and health (scope, schedule, budget) of projects and programs within the portfolio to enable executives to support project execution. Specific features would include: forecasting, status tracking, release planning, roadmap, milestones, project/program hierarchy.

Scrum

Able to support the time-boxed (sprint) approach of the Agile -Scrum software delivery. Specific features would include: Issues, scrum boards, burndown charts, burn up.

Kanban

Able to support the flow based approach of Agile - Kanban software delivery. Specific features would include: Issues, Kanban boards, burn up, cumulative flow diagram.

Provides support for the key elements of [Lean Portfolio Management](https://www.scaledagileframework.com/lean-portfolio-management/). Specific features would include: Release Train, Lean Portfolio Management.

Financial Management

Tracking, managing and reporting on the budget and actual spend of projects and programs within specific portfolios. Able to allocate costs to OPex or CAPex depending on specific organization reporting rules. Time tracking information used to determine labor cost allocations. Specific features would include: budget, spend, time, resource cost.

Resource/Team Management

Tracks and manages the availability of team members by skill, experience, location, and cost, so they can support both planned and unplanned work. Specific features would include: individual capacity, individual skills, individual assignments, labor cost.

Work Planning/Management

Able to define, schedule and assign specific tasks to team members and manage the sequence and interdependency of tasks with each other. This form of structured planning is needed when tasks are clearly defined and sequence of execution is critical. Specific features would include: WBS, Gantt Chart, Task Assignment, Scheduling, task sequence, task relationships.

Out-of-the-box Agile Reporting

Teams have access to more than a dozen out-of-the-box reports with real-time, actionable insights into how their team is performing sprint over sprint. Example reports are sprint burndown, epic burndown, cumulative flow diagram, velocity chart, burn up chart, and sprint report.

Able to gather, document, refine and track approval of business and system requirements. Managing and tracking the relationships between requirements and other requirements, requirements and code, requirements and test cases for each version of requirements. Specific features would include: definition, traceability, requirement hierarchy, dependency.